Printers can make persistent representations of images (e.g., including graphics or text) on paper or a similar physical medium. The two most common types of printers are laser printers and inkjet printers. Inkjet printers can have several printer heads that are fed ink via tubes from containers that include the ink. The printer heads include nozzles to eject the ink onto a physical medium. The printer heads collectively operate to print images onto distinct physical mediums (hereinafter the “mediums”) as they are transported under the printer heads.
Many inkjet printers, in particular single pass printers, tend to use the entire width of the printer to print one or more print jobs simultaneously. For example, a printer that prints on ceramic tiles may print separate images on separate ceramic tiles simultaneously, where the ceramic tiles are placed side-by-side and each tile is printed by one or more of several distinct printer heads that are available for printing.
When printing multiple jobs simultaneously, each job is assigned to one or more dedicated inkjet heads per job. Thus, the size of any printed image for a job is limited by coverage determined by the size of the printer heads multiplied by the number of printer heads available. Moreover, printing multiple print jobs simultaneously is limited by the size of the printed images and the size and number of available printer heads dedicated per job. As such, the size of a job is limited by the number of available printer heads assignable to the job times the printing coverage that can be done by any of the printer heads. Hence, if a print job is smaller than a multiple head coverage, at least one printer head is underutilized. Thus, existing printers do not use printer heads efficiently and their ability to simultaneously print multiple jobs is limited.